"Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them b y enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves." — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington in 1787 (forward from PatriotPost.us)

WE WILL BE SEEING AN ALL-OUT PR BLITZKRIEG. Public relations specialists will try to create the "image" of widespread demands for so-called reform. The MSM will picture opponents of FedMedCare [from Hell] as extremists from the far-right fringe. It's all so predictable, that I'm reposting a column from nearly six years ago: www.RenewAmerica.com/columns/dahlgren/030926

In the May-June 1997 issue of Ms. magazine, Faye Wattleton said, "Who believes that abortion is something other than killing?" So why can't we all just get along and agree that abortion is not "just another medical procedure"?

In his speech to the House of Representatives on September 19, 1996 Henry Hyde of Illinois said, "I finally figured out why supporters of abortion on demand fight this infanticide ban [partial-birth abortion ban] tooth and claw, because for the first time since Roe v. Wade the focus is on the baby, not the mother, not the woman but the baby, and the harm that abortion inflicts on an unborn child. . . .

"Dwight Eisenhower wrote about the loss of 1.2 million lives in World War II, and he said: 'The loss of lives that might have otherwise been creatively lived scars the mind of the civilized world.'"

And it sears the soul when we justify the killing (Ms. Wattleton's word) of more than that many unborn babies in the U.S. — EVERY YEAR — many of them four-fifths born! Do the math! "Run the numbers"! Get mad. Show the same passion over human life that you do over tax cuts! While we maybe "remember 9/11" most of us try to forget that more people die (babies) from abortion every day than died on September 11, 2001. That's just an "average"; actually half of the babies who die every week die on "Saturday" (i.e., the Sabbath): some thirteen or fourteen thousand human lives every Saturday!

We react with euphemisms and catchwords: "Freedom to choose." "Reproductive Rights." "Womens' health." "Planned Parenthood." In other words, "don't worry be happy" — just eat, drink and be merry — for tomorrow we ALL may die?

If we can justify this we can justify post-birth abortions (and we have); and if we can justify that we can justify "assisted suicide" (and we have); and if we can justify that we can justify involuntary euthanasia (the Netherlands formalized it, and we are working on it); and if we can justify that, as Raskolnikov said in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, "Man can get used to anything, the beast!"

The pro-abortion movement will someday smother under the weight of its own "success." After World War II, while America led the "sexual revolution" and most Western nations permissivized abortion-on-demand, West Germany's highest court said, "The historical situation in the Federal Republic with the bitter experiences of the Nazi period led to the establishment of a value system in which human life has absolute priority and according to which even apparently socially unworthy life must not be destroyed."

Unbelievable? You think this is some lie from an extremist "anti-abortion rag"? NAY. This is from the pages of The Milwaukee Sentinel (March 5, 1975): "Germans Remember 1930s, Reject Abortion" by Nick Thimmesch. He said, "The extermination of 10 to 12 million people did not happen through an overnight decision by Adolf Hitler. . . . No, it was a group of Austrian and German physicians and jurists who came to believe, in the 1920s, that there were human lives devoid of value, and that it would be merciful to terminate those lives. . . .

"In May of 1935, the Hamburg Eugenics Court declared that the interruption of pregnancy for eugenic reasons (or, 'racial emergency') was exempt from punishment, thereby legalizing eugenic abortion. . . . There followed the 'mercy killings' of some 275,000 German 'undesirables' in state hospitals: mental patients, epileptics, encephalitics, amputees (including World War I veterans), deformed and retarded children. It was all clean, clinical and modern."

The pro-abortionists' claim that Hitler was "anti-abortion" is a canard; fact is, he didn't want his "Arians" to abort, or course (the pram was the first personnel carrier of the Third Reich), but minorities were a different story! Observers of German society in the 1920s and 1930s maintain the German people did not foresee the horrible death camps but were aware of the eugenics movement and "the new attitude toward the value of human life."

What a coincidence! Americans too just turn up the "bass" on our speakers so as not to hear the silent screams, and we lose ourselves in "Entertainment du jour," as if we were kings who deserve entertaining by a joker at the snap of a finger or the click of a clacker.

By the way, Poland outlawed abortion-on-demand since Communism fell there, and women are NOT DYING FROM COAT HANGER ABORTIONS. Germany, on the other hand, liberalized abortions after the fall of Communism. You say you're still "pro-choice"? THAT'S EASY FOR YOU TO SAY WHEN YOU'RE NOT THE ONE BEING DRAWN AND QUARTERED, OR SUCKED UP A VACUUM TUBE!

As Congressman Hyde said in 1996, "That we are even debating this issue, that we have to argue about the legality of an abortionist plunging a pair of scissors into the back of the tiny neck of a little child whose trunk, arms and legs have already been delivered, and then suctioning out his brains only confirms Dostoyevsky's harsh truth." Man is a beast and we can get used to ANYTHING. We can even JUSTIFY it! We can even call it "LIBERTY"! America, how low can you go?

As Mordecai once told Esther, "If you hold your peace, don't think that you will escape in the king's house" any more than the rest of us. Given the rising popularity of involuntary euthanasia in the judiciary (Florida, for instance), if you speak up, the life you save may one day be YOUR OWN. [That's just a fact of "life'!]

Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton... (more)

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in southern Wisconsin, and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton. In the intro to The Fenton Bible, Fenton said:

"I was in '53 a young student in a course of education for an entirely literary career, but with a wider basis of study than is usual. . . . In commerce my life has been passed. . . . Indeed, I hold my commercial experience to have been my most important field of education, divinely prepared to fit me to be a competent translator of the Bible, for it taught me what men are and upon what motives they act, and by what influences they are controlled. Had I, on the other hand, lived the life of a Collegiate Professor, shut up in the narrow walls of a library, I consider that I should have had my knowledge of mankind so confined to glancing through a 'peep-hole' as to make me totally unfit for [my life's work]."

In 1971-72 Curtis did some writing for the Badger Herald and he is listed as a University of Wisconsin-Madison "alumnus" (loosely speaking, along with a few other drop-outs including John Muir, Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright and Dick Cheney). [He writes humor, too.]